


Crumbling to the Ground

by lodessa



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Divorce, Female Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-02
Updated: 2006-06-02
Packaged: 2017-10-28 13:15:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/308236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/pseuds/lodessa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Addison knows that her marriage has been mostly dead for a long time, but she’s kept on trying, or at least pretending to try.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crumbling to the Ground

Addison knows that her marriage has been mostly dead for a long time, but she’s kept on trying, or at least pretending to try. Mainly the important thing is to exude a sense of confidence and commitment, like she’d never think of leaving. Derek has been pretending too, because it’s easier to give a fake smile and act the role of married and successful and happy than to say ugly words like divorce and change and over. Addison’s own parents stayed married to the very end, despite their complete disinterest in each other. Her father still keeps a picture of her mother in his wallet, as if they’d been the kind of couple who are still deeply in love and devoted after 50 years in a gut wrenchingly sentimental movie. So when Derek turns to Meredith instead of her, and it’s definitely not getting better, Addison’s first instinct is to go home quietly and pretend that nothing has happened. Other women might insist that they get away from Meredith Grey and go back to New York or to some third location where neither of them had reminders that they weren’t the paragon of all that marriage was supposed to be. Other women might throw things and take off for a hotel or an airport (Addison wasn’t fond enough of the trailer to kick him out of it). However, Addison wasn’t raised to take a stand like that. Hundreds of years of stuffy Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and Northeastern stoicism have eliminated the flight or fight instinct for the most part. It’s been replaced by subterfuge. It’s been replaced by bourbon and neatly pressed clothes and obvious smiles and lingering touches with increasingly inappropriate men.

Derek doesn’t come home though. He doesn’t just disappear either. He calls. The call is what is unforgivable. Addison could have ignored weeks of absence and knowing (but not admitting) the truth without a second thought, but the verbalization, Derek’s woeful “I’m sorry”, is something that all her skills of denial and rationalization cannot make disappear.

“I never wanted to hurt anyone, Addie…” Derek continues on admitting there is a problem, that it’s a big one, and that it’s not something they can get past, that their marriage isn’t salvageable like they’ve been pretending.

Addison doesn’t argue with his clearly false claim, but lets him go on telling her. Yes, they argue, and sometimes she is the one to speak truth, but only when she knows he is not really listening and it will not go anywhere. The pretense of their splitting up has been just as fabricated as the pretense of their successful marriage.

Adele Webber always has a cup of tea and a reassuring seat for Addison to sit in. They don’t generally talk about the kicked puppy look that Derek gives Meredith or the fact that Richard goes to see her mother more diligently than he remembers to show up for dinner, but their every breath and every word betray it. The Webber house is neat and tidy, and Adele reigns supreme, the price Richard pays for her not mentioning the shadow between them. Guilt is a funny thing, because he’s been acquiescing for ages; although, he told himself she didn’t know up until the other day. Maybe that admission is what started the avalanche that’s set free the ugly truth that things are over and that people can see through the glass houses they’ve built.

Adele is going to Spain in a few days, and the last few months Addison has expected the same in her life: international conferences and sightseeing alone. Addison knows that Derek still keeps the signed divorce papers in his top drawer. When she gets back to the trailer, she looks and finds they are gone. A note on the refrigerator explains that she was right, and it’s not fair for her to be bound to him when he cannot give her what she deserves. It’s not why he’s leaving, but then Derek always phrases everything to make it seem like it’s about her and not about him, so she shouldn’t be surprised.

Addison hates the trailer, but she has a hard time packing up her things and leaving. Once she does, the mythology of her marriage and her perseverance will crumble away into nothing. Adele is the one to find Addison a cute little cottage, not far from her own residence, to lease. Still Addison waits another week, afraid to leave the familiarity of her cage. Miranda Bailey finally just shows up uninvited (Miranda is decisive like that), packs up all Addison’s things and drives her to her new residence, where Preston has made dinner. Addison has to resist the urge to act like a spoiled child when her colleagues are doing their best to turn a blind eye to the fact that she has been. So she keeps up the external apathy that she’s been using all along, to keep from crying.

When they are gone and she calls the cable company to set up service, Montgomery sounds barren without the hyphenation that has been a web around her. The house feels empty and exposed, and Addison repeats to herself all her professional accomplishments, the things that remain without the façade of her and Derek. The problem is, she doesn’t want to just be a surgeon, to be business without play. So she goes farther back, to little Addie who had never met Derek and always had the right answer for the teachers and laughed at the boys who followed her around with disdain, flipping her crimson hair, carefree. She goes back to daddy’s little girl and mother’s pride and joy. She goes back to ballet lessons and horseback riding. Still, she gets to thinking about how that girl became a woman with a sham of a marriage that she couldn’t even pretend to keep alive, and Addison dismisses her even more vehemently than the surgeon she is left with.

She’s tempted to put down the phone as her chest constricts with each ring before Mark picks up at last, “Addison?”

His voice is full of a hope that Addison forces herself to crush; taking advantage of that hope was something that Derek’s wife did, and that identity has been taken from her. Mark is all apologies, but Addison really just wants to ask one question.

“Who am I, Mark?”

His response is a jumble of poetic beauty, and Addison sees no connection between herself and the image he describes. She thanks him for the niceties anyway, and hangs up the phone, feeling more lost at sea than ever.

Karev saved one of her patients’ lives yesterday, and Addison wishes she could put the mask back on in order to give him positive reinforcement, but she suspects that he’d see right through it. Karev is one of those eerie people who doesn’t seen to be able to leave uncomfortable truths well enough alone, the blunt truths that people like Addison spend their lives ignoring; that’s how he reached this girl in fact. Addison knows that Karev will look right through her emptiness, and she will lose the hold she’s worked so hard to get over him.

But he doesn’t kick her when she’s down. He calls her Dr. Montgomery without the slightest trace of the acid she’d expected, and in his eyes she sees herself not as Derek’s wife, little girl, or star surgeon, but as assertive, dynamic, and effective. Addison learns from Karev’s every word and movement, that she is a vital plant, pruned back to rid her frame of dead weight.

“Thank you, Dr. Karev.” Addison replies, shoulders unknotting slightly, “Get ready to scrub in for surgery.”

Addison shares an elevator with Derek and Meredith. They are the ones who are uncomfortable.


End file.
